Hi there time to share some funny memmorys from your starting career as an adventurer.

I go first.

1: Passing out after a battle in a patch of crabgrass

2: sitting under a table in a ruined keep, being chased by kobolds, but assured they would not find me , since my fellow adventurer a mage, had turned me invisible, sadly kobolds have good scence of smell

3:jumping of a cliff, to avoid some trolls, think i had to roll the dice around 20 times, was level 2, afterwards the DM told me, it was not trolls, but only robbers dressed as such, my char had an fobi for trolls

4: trying to throw a flask of deadly acid, not making the fumble check

Ask our venerable Hamster friend to tell you about the unfortunate meeting of Greek Fire and a giant porcupine.

I guess that does count, though I wasn't the one that triggered that particular event...

It was myself, Mike, Jenn, Erik, Gene, and Jim in this session. Mike was the DM, and I was playing my minotaur... If I remember correctly, Erik was playing a psionicist.

This encounter wasn't long after wolves had attacked our camp while everyone was sleeping. Everyone else's character woke up, except for my minotaur. He didn't wake up until a wolf started gnawing on his ankle... We killed the wolves (with Erik, for some odd reason, levitating over the camp), and my character started working on his first bit of jewelry: a wolf-tooth necklace.

So we later encounter a giant porcupine. Just a random wandering monster... And the only reason Erik didn't accomplish a TPK himself was that Mike was seriously fudging the dice rolls!

We see this giant porcupine. Erik's character is closest, and he decides to toss Greek fire on it. The now-flaming porcupine spasms, and sends giant flaming quills in all directions -- including thru Erik's character, since he had a bad AC and failed his Dex check.

The quills don't just pierce Erik's character, they also pierce the magic shield that was strapped to his back. Make a save for the shield... Fails! Mike rules that since thew shield failed its save, then it too blew up.

That explosion took out Erik's pack -- which had more vials of Greek fire in it!

More failed checks. BOOM!

The resultant explosion should have killed the entire group, but as I said, Mike was making some fast and furious Fudge The Dice checks of his own. Two characters were standing, two were at negative hit points (but above -10), and very little pieces of flaming Erik were raining down over the countryside.

Erik's damage... He took damage from the flaming quills. He took damage from the exploding shield. He took damage from the additional vials of Greek fire... And not that it mattered, but he also failed his saving throw versus death from massive damage. His total damage was 131 points -- in one round, at 3rd level.

After that session, there was a player-enforced ban on Greek fire for a long time.

Same group, different characters -- Gene was playing a jester, who for some reason chose to climb a tree. A dead tree. A dead, rotting tree. In a swamp.

The tree fell on him. He drowned before we could dig him out. This led to the still-running joke of "Jester's dead!" (quoting the movie Top Gun).

Another incident, same group (minus myself and Jenn), Gene's character triggered a trap by pushing a button on the wall. So he declared "I push it again!" This triggered a slow motion lunge across the table by Jim, shouting "Nnnoooo!!!" Again, fudging saved the day.

None of my characters ever had laughable deaths... But my minotaur did once stick a dead NPC in his bag of holding, so she could later be given a proper burial.

Back in the day, when playing in the mystara setting, Principality of Glantri, dont know if any of you are familiar with the setting, but it was geared for magic.

So i was in the city, playing a low level aprentice. Exploring and i found a slide going into the cellar of the cellar of a High Mage.

Me thinking, kewl maybe i could score some good loot

I went down the slide, just to find myself facing a Kobold( our Dm liked Kobolds, for some reason), the kobold was ehhhh taking a dump, basically i was in the clans toilet, i was armed with a knife, and the spell Magic Missile. Managed to kill the little fellow, but not before before one of his clan members had spotted me and alerted everyone in the vast cellar.

So i tried to escape up the slide again, which proved very tricky, since it was very slippery. I confronted the clan warriors, at least trying to die as a hero. Alas to no awail

"Instead of asking why we sleep, it might make sense to ask why we wake. Perchance we live to dream. From that perspective, the sea of troubles we navigate in the workaday world might be the price we pay for admission to another night in the world of dreams."--Richard Greene (letter to Time)

My very first character was a cleric whom, with his companions, found themselves in Ravenloft while we were trying to save our own world (go figure). At one point we had to fight this vampire who had been experimenting with psionics and a powerful artifact. The vampire had posed as a doctor of psychology (sort of) and promised to help my cleric and the rogue in our party (my brother). During this time he had implanted some serious psionic voodoo in our heads.

As we begin to fight him inside of this castle, he pulls out a little bell and rings it. The DM asks us to make will saves and somehow, SOME-freaking-HOW!, the rogue makes the save and yet my cleric with 18 wisdom does not. The cleric promptly turns around and launches himself out of the nearest window and drops twelve stories down to the courtyard. They had to find a wagon to cart my corpse back to a friendly cleric for a resurrection. The party then proceeded to talk about all the things they could have bought with the money wasted on my act of defenestration.

The first game i've ever played... It was before 3.5... I believe 2? the guy who was DMing was taking us through the time of troubles(I think) and he was making us roll some horrific randomness on any magic.

I was playing a druid and tried a lightning storm, while outside, on a hill, with the rest of the party incapacitated (was a scripted loss I was told after) on our would be assassins.

The result was an almost cartoon like bolt after bolt after bolt removing significant chunks of health, and then body parts on my poor druid, incinerated completely and leaving a huge crator.

One year ago, I was DMing a 3.5 game at Bloodstone Lands.The players fled Heliogabalus with a thief guild (I truly don't remember their name... I've got it from "Northern Journey") on their feet. They were at 3rd level.

Knowing that probably they would be caught at the normal road, they traveled by the mountains. So we started a normal night session... The PCs traveled all the day and camped near a cave, letting their horses getting some rain at the night sky.But, after 30 minutes of game play...

A mountain giant was patrouling the area, and saw their horses. The characters heard some noises and checked what was happening. Their first sight, was a huge rock hitting the border of their cave, and I said to them: "Be careful, one of this throw could easily kill any of you". Even so, the druid, too worried with the safety of the horses, got out to cut the rope that was tying them.

What happened next is easy to imagine.. The druid cut the rope, but at the same moment the giant launched the rock. I rolled the d20.. "20"! Than, I rolled another one to confirm the critical "19". Than, I rolled the damage: MAXIMUM. If I remember well, it was 51 damage at 3rd level. He was simple crushed by the rock.

We took off his miniature and put a small stone to represent the place that he were. Than, the druid player said: "At least I saved the horse".

We say that the only thing we could see after he got crushed, was his hand with his thumb to the sky making the sign that everything was ok.

Ed Appel's tale reminds me of a rather memorable PC death in a game I ran once. I was running the Anauroch 3.5 module and the group was getting ready to start exploring Augathra's Crypt. They managed to find the back entrance and dropped into a room full of living holocausts and dust wights.

The Holocausts (essentially living fire tornadoes) were no problem, but once they began attacking the wights, they couldn't made their fort saves to, literally, save their lives. At one point the druid on the party (who was a rather hairy fellow with an unnatural aversion to clothing) saw the fate of his teammates as they, one by one, were turned to stone. So, the round before the petrification effect took place, he declared that his character would "strike a pose, as a free action".

Unfortunately this encounter resulted in a TPK, but I have decided that if the group ever wants to clean up their unfinished business with the Shadovar, in one room of Agauthra's Crypt, there is a statue of a naked, hairy druid, striking a rather heroic pose.

For some novelty, I rolled up a cleric of Greed, because I allways playedwarriors in 2ed. DM put a trail of gold coins going off the path into the forest.As I follewed picking up the coins, I heard singing. Harpies. 1 lvl character.Nuff said. It took me longer to write up the character that to play it, died in 5 minutes

One of my all time favorite deaths was of my Dwarven Battlerager commonly called grunt, he was litteraly too stupid to know his own name. We were participating in the city of the spider queen adventure (Caransily sp), the one where everyone comes back as undead when they die... We encountered a cleric who proceeded to give us much grief, ending with casting finger of death on me, could only fail my fort save on a one, yes someone had to say it at the table dooming me to... yes... fumble... I die, cleric dies, combat ends, as everyone was healing themselves I, now an undead dreadnaught, stood back up. Some fast thinking by the party later, halt undead on the dwarf. Everyone stood around dead dwarfcicle for a few moments not really knowing how to 'kill' me. I had that feat that caused you to not be able to die from hit point loss until my rage finished and everyone knew that I would take out at least half the party before that happened. So with the care and precision on a sledgehammer through plateglass, the wizard and the spellfire channeler throw all of their explosive/fire abilities at me while I am still statuefied. One thing that they did not count on however was the necklace of fireballs that I had picked up early in the adventure and put on cause I thought it was pretty (mind you this is the same dwarf who wore a pink abba because a merchant and his party convinced him it was fashionable). Luckily for my party , but not so much for my now atomized form, my bag of holding failed its saving throw from the calamitous explosion causing all of my serviving equiptment, the goo that was left of me, the explosion and the backlash to be shunted through a rift into the astral plane... that piece of the underdark will never be the same and the scorchmarks certainly wont come clean anytime soon...

I do believe my first character, Cedric the Cleric, was chased off the roof of his newly constructed temple by the party wizard, falling to his death. This event was precipitated by a drunken debacle in the high council of our host city, the specifics of which I can;t really remember.

This one was back in the good old days of 1st and 2nd edition, when we were using critical hit/miss rules from one of the early Dragon magazines. Up comes the mighty warrior wielding the big two-handed sword. He steps up the plate. He swings. He misses his attack roll. He rolls for critical miss. Oops. He rolls on the critical miss table. Result: critical hit - self. He rolls on the critical hit table. He gets his first "00" in years. Decapitation. Funny thing was - although the player was not wild about it, nobody disputed the results, but we did spend an hour or so trying to figure out how that could work "in real life". At the end of that, as we were wont, the cause of death was recorded on the character sheet ("self-inflicted decapitation"), and a new character sheet was brought up.

I've had two good ones. The first is my very first PC, when I was learning how to play. It was an elf fighter/mage back in the days of 2nd ed. I rolled her up with 4 hp. She lasted all of five minutes. After encountering two orcs, whcih I somehow killed (mind you, this was a single PC on a trial adventure) I had 2 HP left. Then I saw a squirrel in a tree, and decided to throw a dagger at it to catch dinner. Big mistake. It was a giant carnivorous sqirrel. My last 2 HP went right out with the suirrel's leap onto my throat....

The other one is the one and only time I ever actually killed a PC as a DM. (I'm rather proud of my record of almost 100% survival rate of PC's in my games...) The party was stopping over in a dwarven city that sported its own gladiator arena. Three members wanted to try out a fight while the others placed bets on it. One of the participants was the party's wizard. I told them it was a lethal combat, and they were okay with that. Then they saw the two dire tigers they were up against. These were all level 8 PCs, so it didn't seem too big of a challenge, considering they had faced worse. But for some reason, the wizard did not use his mage armor spell. He took the brunt of the damage from the dire tigers, and ended up a kitty treat! (On a related note, one of my earlier games had a halfling wizard who also ran afoul of a large feline, in the form of a druid's cougar companion that pounced on him and then decided to lay down on him. He was out, but not dead... Also in that campaign the half-drow fighter unwittingly let loose two displacers guarding a duergar outpost. She then decided to raise the two cubs after they killed the big ones. Later in that same game, the half-drow was cursed by Bast for removing a statue from her shrine, and another PC was diseased by the undead leopard guardian. Still later, that same PC was chased out a third story window by a weretiger with a pike. And then someone unwittingly let loose all of the feline experiments in the tower of the wizard they were sent to to rescue a cat-lord as atonement for Bast. My players seem to have bad luck with cats...)

I have never died, but the funniest death ever was once when our party went through a modified version of "Crypt of Lyzandred the Mad". We were separated and my gnome thief/illusionist character had just figured out the escape route through a room. With his last step out of the room, he had triggered a Symbol of Death trap, just as our 60hp mage was entering... well, it was funny for the everyone else except the mage

I've experienced a number of unpleasant "hilarious" deaths at the hands of sadistic DMs armed with various Grimtooth's Traps books. You'd think drowning in a pit of whipping cream would be fun, although this is not so.

Now, while this wasn't a death to me or my twin bro's characters, but the funniest death I ever had was in a campaign my big bro was running between the three of us. The one that died... was a random NPC's dog, the killer was my twin bro's character, a tiefling warlock named Zoras Davron. Now, what made this funny wasn't that the dog was killed by spells or anything, but the contents of a chamberpot the warlock was emptying after using it.

Now, if you guys are wondering how the dog died from that, well before I explain, I need to let you guys know that this campaign started with a jail break forced on my character, a shadar-kai rogue, who's name I can't remember at the moment, that had just performed a lucky perfect assassination on a prisoner. (rolled a natural 20 on the attempt, and snapped the guy's neck while he was asleep), the tiefling and a NPC cleric named Namor Crisus being the prisoners my rogue released. Anyway, now here's how the dog died: the contents of the chamberpot melted it in half. Now, either tiefling crap deals acid damage, or the prisoners were fed something possibly made with gelatinous cubes or something. The funniest part though came when the owner and the tiefling started yelling at each other, the tiefling on the second floor of the inn, the owner outside on the ground. Eventually the warlock decided to tell the guy that if he wanted to be reimbursed for the dog, to go to the tavern the next day, and find a red headed guy wearing a horned helmet named Perry Mason. The following day, my rogue, the warlock, and the cleric, plus a bag of bones brought along from the prison because the warlock went a little crazy in there since he was chained upside down to keep his tail from hitting people, got a cart and skipped town. Unfortunately, we didn't play in the campaign again since then... so it just ended there.

The clouds have many stories to tell if you look at them close enough, some you already know, but some have yet to be written.

Encounter with Hill Giants and Trolls in one of the deep levels (I think the primary temple). I used my Daern's Instant Fortress to crush several hill giants and trolls...only to cause the ceiling to fall as well...

This is not from my own character, but one of the guys in our gaming group. The boys had an amulet that controlled a demon. Said demons said give me the amulet, they said kill the evil wizard. Demon killed said wizard and demanded they give him the amulet as they agreed. They did. The paladin then demanded that the demon give him the demon's sword (not thinking that they just gave up their means to control the demon). The demon obliged the paladin by decapitating him with its vorpal sword.

I spent hours rolling up a Human Curst Fighter/Ranger in a 3.5 campaign to replace my recently enslaved Elven Cleric.

I poured over the books I had available, carefully selecting feats and equipment to ensure maximum survivability.

I showed up at the party's keep, decked out and ready to adventure. The party's Favored Soul of Selune answered the door. I greeted him and told him I was laboring under the yoke of a curse and I'd like to adventure with this noble group. He immediately cast "Remove Curse" on me and I subsequently crumbled to dust.

Out of character, the FS had no idea that this would kill me, he thought he was helping.

I still hold the record for quickest death in a campaign (approx. 2 min) with that group, as far as I know.

"Seek to bring order to the chaos of life, for in death there is finality and a fixedness of state. Be ready for death for it is at hand and uncompromising."

Saw this one: hollow cube falls over a character in the hall...it is sound-proof and emits blood-like fluid beneath it so the party thinks the character is dead. Inside the cube, the party member is trying to get out when the party wizard casts disentegrate...

old edition house rules and we had a 20/20 critical hit rule that caused massive damage and a system shock roll

young adult dragon was diving and was going to blow his breath weapon and the party rogue shot his bow at long range

here's what had to happen for this all to come together:1) successful roll vs long range penalty2) roll of 20 to hit3) roll of 20 on critical hit reroll4) dragon failed system shock of 99% (only 99 or 100 would fail)

so after all that the party was cheering and high-fiving and saying the greatest one shot kill EVAR!!!

of course all you DMs know what happened next as they were cheering i asked them for a dexterity check to dodge the free-falling dragon

all passed except the rogue

basically he lived the adventurers dream for one second

it's still the most talked about event at our table (happened in 1990 :) )